Tag Archive for: Sidebar: Charles H. Green

(Apologies to those who get my blog by email: you got it 3 times. Cause? Human error—mine. The link is live now, and I won’t make that mistake again.)

Truth-telling is easy with little at stake. If we’re asked at a party, “How long have you been with XYZ,” we’ll answer, “almost six months.”

But if a prospective client asks us, enquiring about our credentials, “How long have you been with XYZ?” we’re tempted to say, “oh, a bit under a year.”

The more at stake, the more we manage, spin, tweak, massage and control the truth. After all, the tough situations demand that we put our best foot forward, make sure the client is fully informed about the full breadth of our capabilities. And we’d hate to lose the job for not appearing confident and aggressive about our abilities and our desires.

Yet our instincts here are dead wrong.

When there’s more at stake, the value of direct truth-telling is higher, and the risk lower, than the course of “managing” the truth.

Here’s why, and how.

Choose an issue critical to your client. Do you have the experience to help? Do you have the capabilities? The industry knowledge? The judgment? The connections? A solid methodology?

Clients want answers to these questions because they believe they affect work quality. Clients need to feel confident in their assessments of you. If you speak the truth, you help them gain that confidence in their assessment. If you are perceived to be “managing” the truth, they will have less confidence in their assessments.

They will also be annoyed at your attempt to put your interest ahead of theirs. That leads to still less trust.

Truth-managing thus decreases client satisfaction and trust. Straight truth-telling enhances both.

“Hey, hang on a minute—we’re trying to get the job!”

Managing the truth has two likely outcomes. You may get the job—then run the risk of not living up to expectations. Or, you lose it because they felt you were stretching the truth.

The first is pretty bad, but less common than we think, because we’re not as good as we think at fooling clients. But the second is bad too—it ruins our reputation and future prospects.

By contrast, if you tell the truth and get the job, then the client has chosen you for exactly what you claim to be. You start off with a sound and truthful relationship, instead of endlessly managing expectations.

If you tell truth and don’t get the job, you’ll probably get straight feedback about why you didn’t get it. Truth-stretching firms don’t get such feedback.

More importantly, you walk out with a reputation for truth-telling. This increases your likelihood of being called back when they need just what you have, and of getting positive referrals.

How do you tell the straight-up truth when all your instincts say to tweak it?

Meditate, then rehearse.

Meditate on all the reasons above why you’re better off telling the truth. Don’t just learn them, believe them.

Find your own one-liner responses to the tough questions: they can be cute, or funny, or neither. The one thing they must be is straightforwardly truthful.

The key is the meditation, not the rehearsal. Once you believe and accept that truth-telling is a best practice, the rehearsal becomes easy.

Because it takes remarkably less energy to speak the truth than to speak any other version of reality.

Business Week’s cover story (Jan. 22, 2007 issue) is called “Sweet Revenge: the Power of Retribution, Spite and Loathing in the World of Business.”

It’s a fun read, dishing classic stories ranging from how Cornelius Vanderbilt got even (“I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you”), to Katzenberg vs. Eisner (Hollywood dustups are the most entertaining) to Michael Dell vs. Steve Jobs (the jury’s still out on this one, though as of today Jobs has the edge).

There are a few insights: "The simplest way to create a culture is to pick an enemy," says Garnett [CEO of Ingres, and one of many enemies Oracle’s Larry Ellison appears to have crated over the years.] "We have an enemy: It’s Oracle."

And, “Revenge is a response to a perceived injustice or what psychologists call narcissistic injury, known to you and me as a wounded ego. This reaction is often acute in entrepreneurs or members of family businesses, whose sense of self-worth is bound to their businesses.”

But for the most part, this article describes, rather than diagnoses. But that’s not because the topic is without implication.
The incidence of revenge, and its motivational power, stand in contradiction to what business education describes as the way things get done.

College business courses and MBA programs teach rational decision-making; hypotheses and evidence, decision trees, net present value, hurdle and discount rates, the 4Ps. Not much time on dealing with vengeful bosses or peers.

People have strong feelings—revenge, love, lust, justice—which affect not just the workplace, but top-level strategies and the makeup of entire industries. Yet this is not, for the most part, taught.

It’s not taught to chemistry majors either.  Or actuaries.  But we expect it of business—I think of business as practical, applied economics.  Yet increasingly it is the theory that is taught, not the application.  (See also my posting  “Harvard Business School 30 Years Later: Bring Back Joe”).

Teaching theory alone is like learning a language solely through the dictionary.  Should business explain the world, or teach about managing in it?  The former doesn’t guarantee the latter.

I’m for teaching people to change the world, not just understand it. Vengeance 101, anybody?

In 1967, Thomas Harris wrote “I’m OK, You’re OK,” arguably the most famous use of a 2×2 matrix (with cash cows/dogs/stars and question marks a close second).

Today’s Big Western Wisdom is Positive Psychology; see the NYTimes’ Happiness 101.

I think I’m OK, You’re OK is a terrific book; and the wisdom in positive psychology is timeless, universal, and very valuable.

But I also think they both leave something on the table.

Do you, like me, advise or influence others for a living? Then you may suspect that Harris pulled punches. My inner voice says:

“I’m OK, you’re an idiot,”

and

“You’re OK, I’m an undetected fraud.”

If you’re like me, those two mantras rent space in our heads almost simultaneously. We are (or is it just me?), as Bill Wilson put it, insecure egomaniacs, buffeted by a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

IOYO and PP suggest we get in the flow, bliss out, focus, be aware, accept, be happy.

Well, yes—and no.

To do great work, being a little nuts sometimes helps. The trick is not to kill the beast within, but to feed it—while keeping it in the cage.

St. Augustine saw value in suffering. Nietzsche wrote of the spiritual bankruptcy of serenity (as did Seinfeld). Carlos Castaneda, in Journey to Ixtlan, portrays alienation as the spawn of wisdom. In William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, the twice-born are way more interesting than the once-born. Artists know what doesn’t kill you makes you—more creative.

An ex-boss, when I told him sadly I was getting divorced, said, “Congratulations! What a wonderful learning opportunity!” Turns out he was right.

I once showed a CEO the results of a psychological survey of his top 20 consultants. “Jim,” I said nervously, “the shrink says these are not the profiles of psychologically balanced, healthy people!”

Jim looked up at me patiently, and said, “Yeah?”

He was right too.

The day my pulse doesn’t jump twenty points in the first client meeting is the day I’ll leave the profession—suffering either from arrogance, indifference, or burnout.

The challenge is to be constructively schizophrenic—to harness the power of the dark side and channel it.

So here’s my reformulation:

“I’m an idiot, you’re an idiot. So let’s get over it, let’s work together and let’s do something great.”

(Credit where due: Anthony de Mello said it first—"I’m an ass, you’re an ass." As he said, it’s about ego deflation.)

David Maister wrote, “the problem is never what the client said it was in the first meeting.” He didn’t exaggerate.

Jeff Thull says the inability of clients to fully understand the solution is the hallmark of complex organizations in today’s world.

So clients suffer from the idiot disease as well—they suspect their ignorance, as we do.

But we’re sicker—painfully aware of what we don’t know, yet also knowing it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Paranoia is rational. And yet—this is great news.

If—a big “if”—we can jointly accomplish the ego deflation inherent in “I’m an idiot, you’re an idiot,” then:

• we don’t wast time posturing
• There are no dumb questions
• We are free to help each other
• The Not Invented Here syndrom Disappears
• We can seek each other’s advice – and offer it freely
• We can produce some really, truly, scary good work.

I like to think we can keep the edge. A Netscape programmer in the heady early days of Web 1.0 wrote, “We come into this world naked, bloody and screaming; but if you play your cards right, it doesn’t have to stop.”

Don’t settle for serenity alone. Be a cynic who trusts. Seek dare-to-be-great humility. Embrace your idiocy and leverage it. Don’t worry—be happy.

As one famous control freak advisor puts it—“It’s a Good Thing.”

The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog got? Four—because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Or so you would think.

But not if you’re in the mainstream of what I’ll broadly call the customer satisfaction business. In that case, there are a lot of multi-legged dogs out there, based on what’s being called “loyalty.”

The “customer loyalty” movement started in the early 90s with Fred Reicheld at Bain, and Jim Heskett and Len Schlesinger at Harvard Business School. The idea was simple, elegant, and empirically airtight—companies with loyal customers were way more profitable. More profitable, in fact, than the leading paradigm of being number one or number two in market share.

They described the components that created loyalty—familiarity, collaboration, switching costs, the creation of common attitudes. As an indicator of loyalty, they chose customer retention. It was great work.

“Loyalty” was a powerful choice to describe the phenomenon. It conjured up “semper fi,” “’til death do us part,” “greater love hath no man than this…” Dictionary synonyms include fealty, devotion, and honor. Loyalty is a virtue.

The choice of words made you sit up and take note.

Well, 15 years ago it did. Things have changed. Today:

Websites discuss price promotions for “loyalty” programs.

A major global IT consultancy advertises its “loyalty factory.”

A world-leading customer service organization equates loyalty with share of wallet.

Exemplifying the new "up is down" thinking, an article says "customer loyalty is the result of well-managed customer retention programs."

Guess what the results of such instrumentalism are? Lower loyalty.

Customer retention was originally an indicator of loyalty. In a bizarre form of business idolatry, the indicator has been substituted for the real thing. (Kind of like the Lakers’ coach saying to me, “Green, put on this Kobe Bryant shirt and go sub for him—maybe no one will notice the swap.” Except here it’s working.)

We’ve taken a supremely emotional word and stripped emotions from it. “Old” loyalty is about intentions and motives; new “loyalty” couldn’t care less about motive—results are all that matter. “Old’ loyalty is about relationships. New “loyalty” is about behaviors—yours, insofar as it benefits me. The only relationship involved is that between your money and my pocket.

Loyalty is just one example. The language of business has morphed from the human commercial relationship between buyer and seller to the financial one between buyers and shareholders. The preferred psychology of business has become Skinnerian, not emotional.

Managing customer relationships is coming to mean measuring just how much of just what kind of food is needed to get the rats to click just the right bar. Who needs relationship skills when you’ve got goals, behaviors, measurements and rewards?

It’s infecting evaluation systems too. How’m I doing? I don’t care to know, unless you input the data into the survey links to my milestones. And would you agree completely, strongly, or just generally, that I provided you with excellent service today?

With a US and global gap between haves and have-nots driving a social crisis larger every day, this mechanistic thinking serves everyone badly. We need business leaders and managers who can conceive of commercial relationships in human terms. We need business institutions that take their share of responsibility for molding our human future, not just our behaviors.

Language matters. A lot. When smart, decent people sincerely say loyalty means share of wallet, when major companies talk about loyalty “factories” with no sense of irony, when leading business publications adopt and promulgate shifts in language with no comment, when we mistake side effects for causes—then we have lost not just a word, but the concept it referred to.

Imagine seeing a dog waiting patiently for its master—and having no word to describe the phenomenon. The dog will not behave differently for our want of vocabulary. But we will have lost the ability to articulate a virtue, receiving in return only a new word for price-shopping.

That would sincerely be a shame. (No, really, it would be! I’m not faking it!)

(The tail and leg joke is Abe Lincoln’s. I’ve heard the sincerity joke variously attributed: my guess is George Burns. Do you know? Do tell.)

I once consulted to a convenience store chain with 150% store manager turnover. Turns out they gave lie detector tests to each manager every month to cut down on theft. The frequent measurement sent a message to managers— “someone must be getting away with this, maybe I’ll try it.” Click. Results perverted.

The Gallup Management Journal has a piece titled “Engaging Customers—All Day, Every Day.” Here’s how they tee up the issue:

It’s tough to exaggerate the importance of customer engagement. Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over average customers in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth, according to Gallup research, while actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount on the same measures…

So, considering the amount of money on the line, it pays to scrutinize every single customer-employee encounter. That’s exactly why so many call centers survey customers to determine their level of engagement.

But what happens between measurements? At best, customer service representatives (CSRs) see their customer scores once a month. Many CSRs only get their scores quarterly or annually. It’s difficult to sustain energy and focus on customer engagement when the feedback is infrequent. The challenge for team leaders and managers becomes finding ways to keep CSRs committed to engaging their customers, even when new data isn’t available. Specifically, how can team leaders keep customer engagement from feeling like an isolated event, rather than a way of doing business?

Note two assumptions the article makes:

1. The purpose of all this “customer engagement” stuff is to increase share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth for the seller;

2. The ideal management tool for accomplishing the above would be massive feedback in the form of customer survey data—way more frequently than monthly.

This is perverse on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Let’s look at just three.

Perversity number one: the advice that Gallup then serves up is excellent—and has almost nothing to do with their premise. Their advice is to establish emotional connections with customers across four levels of customer engagement—Confidence, Integrity, Pride, and Passion—and they give excellent advice about how to do it. Well done.

Why oh why, then, do they position this advice as being the fallback alternative to multiple choice phone surveys? When was the last time you filled out a “how did we do” survey except when you were pissed off? The data are necessarily non-specific, post-hoc, and suspect. Why do we think it better than real-time good supervisory feedback?

Perversity number two: mistaking the end for the means. If integrity is in service to making a buck, why should anyone trust you? Faking sincerity is a con job.

No one knowingly trusts a con man—because he’s in it for himself. Companies who say the purpose of customer service is to make money are simply con men who are more up-front about their goal.

Make profit an outcome, not a goal. If you make it a goal, you sow distrust. If your goal in establishing trust is to make money, you will lose both.

Perversity number three: believing that extrinsic measures are better than intrinsic ones. If the system rewards and encourages me for going from a weekly score of 3.5 to one of 3.6, then I will obsess about tricks, tweaks and tunings. If you then peg my compensation to it, you can be sure the last thing I’ll think about is true customer connection. Click. Results perverted.

Read Alfie Kohn’s fine book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes. Someone who actually cares about me will beat the pants off someone who fakes caring to make money off me. And ironically, the first person is far more profitable anyway. As a byproduct.

Do what Gallup recommends as second best; it beats the hell out of massively focusing on extrinsic measures. And not just for convenience store managers.